Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure

Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambigue (1961; Grand Prix Litterature d'Afrique Noire, 1962) is another volume from Heinemann's historic African Writers Series. It is Kane's first novel and his most significant work (he spent much of his later life as an administrator for the Senegalese government), written while he was a philosophy student in Paris in the 1950s. It is autobiographical at a deep level, as the protagonist Samba Diallo is born of a high-status family (the "Diallobe"; Kane is of a Fulani political family), receives a traditional Koranic education (i.e. memorizing the Koran) as a child and is then sent to receive a "Western" education in Paris for the anticipated benefit of his society: all in common with Kane himself.

The novel is highly didactic, consisting mostly of dialogues between Samba Diallo and his elders, teachers, and a family of African acquaintances in Paris. The language is elevated and elegant (my Heineman edition is an English translation by Katherine Woods), and the movement from childhood through college and final return to Africa is artfully handled with a sometimes dream-like atmosphere and some nice descriptions of the African sky. Having said that, it is patently a vehicle for a sustained discussion of the relationship of the materialist "West" and traditional religious philosophy. In this case that religion is Islam, which makes the book timely for contemporary readers but also separates it from much of the African literature of the time in that it lacks some of the specificity of place (and ethnicity) one finds in other period works.

There is a psychological undercurrent here that I have not seen mentioned in any of the few scanty discussions of the book I can find by Googling around: the fact that the young man is sent by his elders to a faraway place where he loses his cultural bearings must have been a source of resentment. This after years at the Koranic school where his beloved teacher is very free with corporal punishment which here as in other African novels is presented in graphic detail but not obviously censured. Thus the reader must wonder if some of the internal conflict which is the subject of the book is displaced anger about the denial of self-determination experienced by a tribal scion. I note too that the narrative is coolly controlled and there is never any direct expression of anger, even as the book ends with the young protagonist's apparent death.

Meanwhile the overt message is that the loss of godliness, both in terms of religious dogma and personal spirituality, is too high a price to pay for the worldly advances of Western technological materialism. Of course this is an entirely conservative message. It is also a problem specific to sophisticated, educated elites in the post-colonial world - it is the problem of the college student. Thus the novel does not appear, from my attenuated, strange perspective, as progressive as it must have to African and French readers of the 50s and 60s.

If the status of religion in modern society is a serious interest, this book is an intelligent discussion of that. It also is written at a fine, elegant level. But it is ultimately an evangelical tract and a bit idiosyncratic compared to most of the novels in the African Writers Series.

Sembene Ousmane

God's Bits of Wood (French original, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 1960) is the only novel by the Senegalese writer Sembene Ousmane that I've read, I gather from my follow-up research that many consider it his best. I think I'll go on to read Xala (1973) which looks interesting.

This book is a narrative of the real-life Dakar-Niger railway workers' strike of 1947-1948. The strike was long, bloody, and ultimately successful: the African workers were given the same rights and benefits as the French workers (the French and whites in general are called toubabs by the locals). A sticking point was the practice of polygamy by the Muslim African workers: the French authorities had refused to give family allowances to men with multiple wives, with accompanying reactionary rhetoric about degeneracy, too much breeding and so forth that outraged the deeply moralistic Senegalese and Malian workers. The French underestimated the abilities of deeply committed cadres of organizers, and repressive violence that had been sufficient in earlier labor disputes this time provoked the mass participation of the women, something hitherto unheard of. Thus the strike was a major turning point both for labor relations between the French colonial authorities and African workers, and for the political culture of the workers' community.

The perspective is that of the workers and their families in the gritty maintenance hub of Thies, where families one or two generations out of subsistence farming have been transformed into a classic proletariat that assembles at the plant gates for the morning whistle and returns to the shanty town at night. Ousmane depicts a large community of disparate characters, all with their own strengths and weaknesses and their own roles to play. There is a conspicuous absence of the heroic individual in favor of a communal dynamic driven both by tradition and by modernization. In fact the title is an idiomatic African phrase (the Africans here speak Ouolof and Bambara) used to avoid using specific names, which is thought to attract demons, a manifestation of a deeply-held value of humility.

This kind of social realism requires quick sketching of numerous characters and it is impressive that Ousmane manages to pack so many personalities and relationships into a 248-page novel. There is Bakayoko the itinerant organizer, offstage for the first part of the novel as he is walking the backcountry with his hat and his pack taking the message to remote villages along the line. He is completely dedicated to his cause but needs the help of Lahbib who has a better sense of political tactics. N'Deye Touti attracted to both Bakayoko and Beaugosse; when Beaugosse sides with the toubabs on the grounds that they represent progress (a not uncommon opinion) N'Deye Touti chooses Bakayoko, only to be stung by his rejection as he must move on with his work (Maimouna, the blind woman who sees much, had warned her of this). Bakayoko, who already has a wife, is against polygamy anyway (as in all societies there are the conservatives and the progressives to be found here), although he might have given in for Penda, a young woman with a reputation as the town's harlot who emerges as a brave leader on the women's hard march to Dakar, where she is shot down by soldiers at the bitter end. Mame Sofi reviles Penda and is on the lookout for witches, an obstructive nativist presence until her consciousness is raised by the march.

Ramatoulaye, one of the central characters, is a wife and mother in her 30s who wants no trouble but is inexorably drawn in to the struggle by her innate good character. Her brother, El Hadji (an honorific for a man who has made the hadj to Mecca) Mabigue, represents the Imams who are depicted here as apologists and enforcers for the authorities and the status quo. In this critical appraisal of the clergy, the social realism weaving a large cast of characters together, and the background of a bitter labor dispute the book reminded me of the Irish author James Plunkett's Strumpet City (1969) which takes a similar approach to the bitter Dublin dockworker's strike and lockout of 1913. Both novels treat of early conflicts that lead on to much larger subsequent events.

As with so many West African writers Ousmane celebrates the organic democratic behavior of deeply spiritual village Africans, even after they are thrust into semi-urban settings where they feel displaced. He also is typical of African writers in his focus on the suffering and the stoicism of individuals, indicting many destructive forces but none more than plain callousness and the smug hypocracy of the privileged. He is an excellent writer all around, my last point would be that unlike some of his contemporaries he does not let his didactic intent coarsen his prose. Readers get a sophisticated political education without a sense that they are swallowing any medicine at all. Highly recommended.

Mariama Ba

Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (original French, Une Si Longue Lettre), 1980, is short, 89 pages: as advertised, it is a letter from Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher living outside of Dakar, to her friend Aissatou, who has gone on as a translator to a life in Europe and the United States. These are not impoverished people, they are professionals with houses, cars, and children in schools, but the reality of extended families, crowded communities and precarious good fortune insures that financially desperate characters are always in the mix.

The real issue here, though, is marriage. This book is a narrative of injustice based on Islam's acceptance of polygamy, something Arab evangelists of Islam had in common with African populations during the spread of Islam across that continent. Ramatoulaye is herself a Muslim with a strong spiritual practice, and her faith gives her the strength to come out into the light of forgiveness, firmness and integrity during her struggles. Ba does not inhabit a simple world. All of the characters are respected, there are some who have progressive ideas, others who are good-hearted, and this compassion extends to the older men and younger women who can make life such a hell for older women in a society where polygamy is accepted.

Aissatou's vengeful mother-in-law orchestrated a second marriage for her husband, the orphaned daughter of his uncle who his mother has raised explicitly for this purpose. Ramatoulaye, years later, essentially loses her husband when he marries one of her daughter's friends after twenty-five years of marriage, and quickly drifts away from the first wife who has had twelve pregnancies, and has nine children, by him. Both women are galvanized by the experience to develop their own lives and characters. The letter is written on the occasion of the death of Ramatoulaye's husband and the revelation that one of her daughters has become pregnant, which perhaps helps to explain the atmosphere of forgiveness and compassion that suffuses the book, although hard-won spiritual strength is clearly driving this narrative.

There is an interesting connection between writing quality and the quality of passion that a writer has. Many African novels that I read are engaging for place, for custom, and for history, but Ba's book stands out as particularly well-written, and one can't help but feel that the precision of the sentences is reflecting the author's passion to communicate the power of the injustice that she has seen and experienced. The heterogeneity of attitudes, opinions, and styles expressed by the various characters defy easy stereotypes. It is a great loss that Ba passed away after writing only two books. This one reveals talent to spare.